At a time when climate politics in the United States and globally remain deeply polarized, Will Hackman, a climate advocate and political operative, argues that the climate movement needs a new language — one rooted less in doom, guilt and abstract planetary crisis, and more in people’s everyday lives, health, safety, costs and communities. In his new book, Radically Reframing Climate Change: A Guide to Saving Ourselves, he makes the case that climate advocates have too often spoken to those who already agree with them, while failing to reach people who may be cautious, doubtful or simply disconnected from the issue. The challenge, he says, is not only scientific or technological. It is political, cultural and communicative. In the United States, climate change remains politically polarized, with surveys showing that Republicans are less likely than Democrats to view it as an urgent threat, making climate messaging particularly challenging across ideological divides. Mongabay spoke with Hackman over video call about climate messaging, grassroots activism, fossil fuels, political polarization, and why he believes the climate movement must rebuild, creating a broader and more hopeful constituency. Mongabay: You write in your book that much of climate messaging has been framed around fear, guilt and apocalypse. Is that still the right way to talk about climate change? Will Hackman: I think the nature-based messages — polar bears, melting glaciers, “there is no planet B,” “save the planet,” “world on fire” — work for people who already care about climate change. But they do not…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Initially welcomed, Mali's 2020 coup has created deepening insecurity: with ongoing jihadist insurgency in the north and the capital encircled, the balance of power across the Sahel is shifting.

- 2026/06 / article, 2026/06 mali

MANNAR, Sri Lanka — Each year, the arrival of greater flamingos transforms the lagoons of northern Sri Lanka into a mesmerizing spectacle of pale pink and white. Their synchronized movements across the shallow waters of Mannar attract birdwatchers, photographers, tourists and nature lovers from around the country and abroad. But behind this beauty lies a growing crisis. Recently, three flamingos were killed in Mannar after a collision with overhead power lines that crossed their flight path. Initial reports suggested electrocution, but according to Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWC) veterinary surgeon Balachandran Giritharan, who conducted the necropsies, the birds were not electrocuted. Instead, their long necks were slashed mid-flight when they struck the cables. The incident has renewed concerns among conservationists who have previously warned against energy infrastructure cutting across sensitive wetland habitats such as Vankalai Sanctuary, another Ramsar wetland in Mannar. Environmentalists had identified large waterbirds such as flamingos as being vulnerable to collisions. The latest flamingo deaths also add to the mounting environmental concerns surrounding development projects, particularly in Mannar, including proposed wind power projects. The issue drew international attention after the withdrawal of developer Adani Green Energy Limited (AGEL) from a disputed wind power project in Sri Lanka earlier this year. The Mannar region, with its strategic wind resources, has increasingly become a battleground between renewable energy expansion and biodiversity conservation. Flamingos are more vulnerable to collisions with power cables during dusk and early morning hours. Image courtesy of Indika Jayathissa. A global threat to flamingos Across the world,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

A newly released book documenting urban forestry efforts across Africa argues that trees and green spaces are no longer a luxury for African cities, but a critical response to climate change, biodiversity loss, and urban inequality. Published by Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo (JCPZ), Urban Forests and Green Spaces in Africa: Case Studies and Lessons from Across the Continent brings together 34 case studies from 14 African countries, covering everything from restoring biodiversity around wetlands in Rwanda’s capital Kigali, creating Miyawaki forests (forests with native trees planted closely together) in Kenya’s capital Nairobi, greening heat-stressed neighborhoods in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare, transplanting baobabs in Senegal to rehabilitating degraded urban land in South Africa. Hot days, hot nights, and heatwaves have become more frequent across Africa, concludes the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s most authoritative scientific assessment on climate change. The report also finds that coastal cities are vulnerable to floods related to rainfall events and sea level rise. Palm-lined trees provide near-continuous canopy cover along a boulevard in Bahir Dar, the capital of Ethiopia’s Amhara region. The book notes that canopy closure along some of the city’s main streets approaches 100%, making Bahir Dar one of the most heavily treed urban centers in Africa. Image courtesy of Cathy Watson/CIFOR-ICRAF. As African cities experience rising temperatures, worsening floods, biodiversity loss, and rapid urbanization, the book argues that urban forests and green infrastructure are essential tools for climate resilience. Beyond storing carbon, trees and green spaces…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Protests erupted on Sunday night outside of the Delaney Hall immigrant jail in Newark, New Jersey, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) moved to transfer a strike leader from the jail.

Some 300 detainees launched a hunger and labor strike on Friday in protest of the conditions at the ICE jail. On Sunday, activists and family members learned that the jail was preparing to move Martin Soto, one of the detainees who had announced the strike.

Gabriela Soto, Martin’s wife, saw ICE agents loading Martin into a van, and ran to block the van that held her husband from leaving the site. Other demonstrators joined in blocking the van from leaving the facility, and forced it back to the detention facility. Protestors formed a blockade for hours to prevent Martin Soto from being moved out of the site.

“Free Martin!” the protestors chanted. “Free them all!”

Later, around 1 am on Monday, ICE agents began to move a caravan of vehicles out of the facility, and protestors again attempted to block the vehicles from leaving. ICE agents then shoved aside protestors, pushing them against the sidewalk and against cars, and pepper sprayed at least one protestor.

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson announced on Monday that after “ICE successfully dispersed approximately 70 agitators” it succeeded in transferring Martin to another facility.

Since the start of the hunger strike, family members and supporters have gathered outside of the detention center. Among others, a 10-year-old child spoke about her father, who is currently being imprisoned in the facility by ICE.

On Friday, Gabriela Soto translated calls from prisoners, including her husband Martin, who said, “We deal with racism, with bad conditions, with guards that do not help us…. It gets worse all the time, and they don’t treat us like people.”

The guards soon cut access to the detainees’ phones so that these calls could not continue.

People being imprisoned at Delaney began a hunger strike after signing two letters describing their circumstances and conditions.

“We feel vulnerable and, in a way, kidnapped — detained without justification — not to mention that we are being tortured physically and psychologically due to the poor food resources provided in these detention centers,” they wrote. “Families are being destroyed and separated.”

“We have seen judges in this detention center who are ready to carry out deportations and mass expulsions without properly reviewing cases,” they went on. “We live with anguish and fear of appearing in court.”

One participant in the labor and hunger strike wrote in a letter describing the conditions of the jail:

We have people sleeping on the floor for not being processed quick enough. They neglect medications for people who are in dire need of it. All of our bonds are denied and they are telling us to file habeas corpus for everyone that is in here, they constantly tell us we are a danger to society. The same judge that denies your bond is the same judge that reviews our immigration court cases and that is not fair.

Delaney opened as an ICE jail in May 2025 in a $1 billion, 15-year contract between private prison contractor GEO Group and ICE. It is the largest ICE facility on the East Coast and has faced pushback since the announcement of its opening.

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Andy Kim visited the detention center Saturday, and wrote on X that he saw inside it a “high school student crying and saying she just wanted to graduate senior year”; a woman “who had a miscarriage in the detention facility” and was “left to manage [it] all on her own”; and a “carton with the milk inside congealed solid.”

On Monday, Kim returned to the site, and said that he was pepper sprayed. “Instead of engaging with me and others about the poor conditions, ICE sent in an armored vehicle and a line of armed agents that only poured gasoline on the fire,” he wrote on X. Kim described ICE agents tackling and restraining protestors and firing pepper balls and spray into the crowd.

On Tuesday morning, the protest continued, and video footage from outside Delaney once again shows ICE agents detaining and dragging protestors.

Leqaa Kordia — a Palestinian from East Jerusalem who was arrested in Newark when meeting with immigration officials about her status and then detained for over a year in ICE jails for her Palestine activism — wrote a statement in solidarity with the Delaney hunger strikers.

“When you choose hunger over submission, you’re doing something that terrifies ICE,” she wrote on Monday. “You are proving that even when they break your bodies, they can’t break your will. You are proving that a person stripped of freedom can’t be stripped of dignity.”

“I know the conditions you’re enduring,” she went on. “The rotten food. The medical neglect. The psychological torture of indefinite limbo. I know what it took for you to look at that tray of slop and say: No more. Not until I’m free.”

This article originally appeared on Dean Baker’s Patreon. It is reprinted here with permission.

Our Secretary of Defense (or War) Pete Hegseth seems to be having a really great time killing people in Iran, but his live action video games come at a big cost, not just in lives, but in budget dollars. To be clear, the main reason to be opposed to this pointless war is its impact on the people of Iran and elsewhere in the region. But it also has a huge economic cost that is seriously underappreciated.

The short-term cost is the shortage of oil, natural gas, fertilizers, and other items that would ordinarily travel through the Straits of Hormuz. This shortage has already sent prices of many items soaring. The impact is not just on the goods themselves, but there is a large secondary impact due to higher shipping costs, and if fertilizer supplies are not resumed soon, higher food prices, due to lower crop yields. This is a big hit to people in wealthy countries, but it is life-threatening to people living on the edge in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

But in addition to the short-term cost, there is also a longer-term cost insofar as we are making new enemies and therefore will have higher bills for military spending long into the future. We already got the first taste of this as the Trump administration floated the idea of a $200 billion special appropriation to cover the cost of the war.

The Military is Really Big Bucks

There is remarkably little appreciation of how much money is at stake with wars and the military. This is because the media have a deliberate policy of uninformative budget reporting. They just write huge numbers in the millions or billions, knowing they are completely meaningless to almost everyone who sees them.

It would be virtually costless to provide some context for these numbers, for example, expressing them as a percentage of the budget. That would take any competent reporter ten seconds and add maybe ten words to a news article. This would tell you that the $200 billion (2.7% of the budget) Trump wants for his Iran war is a relatively big deal, while the $550 million (0.008% of the budget) Trump saved us by defunding public broadcasting was not.  

It is striking to see that Congress might be willing to quickly cough up this money when it has refused far smaller sums that could have made a huge difference in the lives of tens of millions of people. For example, the extension of the Covid relief enhancement of the Earned Income Tax Credit would have cost around $40 billion (0.6% of the budget) annually. Extending the more generous Obamacare subsidies would have cost $27 billion (0.4% of the budget) annually.  

And it is important to remember that these increased costs are not likely to be just a one-year expenditure. The military budget was 3.0% of GDP in 2001, before the war in Afghanistan, and projected to fall to 2.7% over the next several years. Instead, we got the Afghan War followed by the invasion of Iraq. By 2010, spending was up to 4.6% of GDP. The difference between actual and projected spending comes to almost 2.0% of GDP, or more than $600 billion annually in today’s economy.

The Peace Dividend

In contrast to the Trump administration’s efforts to seek enemies, in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States looked to diffuse tensions with the Soviet Union and saved a huge amount of money on military spending as a result. Military spending hit a post-Vietnam War peak of 6.1% of GDP in 1986. It then fell sharply as Presidents Reagan and Bush I negotiated arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. It was down to 4.7% of GDP in fiscal 1992, when the Soviet Union collapsed. It continued to fall through the 1990s, when the United States faced no major enemies.

At that point, Russia was actually a limited ally. There were many people in the foreign policy establishment who wanted to keep it that way, looking to accommodate post-Soviet Russia in a post-Cold War world.

Instead, we took the direction of expanding NATO eastward, incorporating the former East Bloc countries into NATO, starting with Hungary. Eventually, all the former East Bloc countries were added to NATO, and then former Soviet republics such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were added. In 2008, George W. Bush pushed for the addition of Ukraine and Georgia as well.

It is worth noting that it was not pre-ordained that NATO would be expanded eastward. NATO was formed as an anti-Soviet alliance. With the Soviet Union out of business, it was reasonable to think that NATO would be disbanded.

This was not just the dream of fringe peaceniks; many fully credentialled cold warriors also argued against expanding NATO eastward. This list includes Jack Matlock and Richard Pipes, both of whom held high-level positions under Reagan. It also included George Kennan, the godfather of the Cold War doctrine of containment. Even Henry Kissinger opposed including Ukraine in NATO.

It’s not clear whether Russia would have developed into a hostile state and potential enemy if NATO had not continued to exist and expand Eastward. We can all share our speculations on that counterfactual, but one thing that is not debatable is that having a major enemy is costly.

The Iran Nuclear Deal and Trump’s War

President Obama negotiated an agreement to restrain Iran from developing nuclear weapons in 2015. While there were issued raised with the monitoring of the deal, rather than trying to work through these problems, Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. That decision, along with Biden’s failure to restore the agreement, created the conditions under which a second Trump administration, could be push by Benjamin Netanyahu into this war. The war has already proved incredibly costly for the country and the world, and the costs could well go far higher.

But apart from this war, Trump seems determined to raise military spending even further. He has said he wants the country to spend 5 percent of GDP, or $1.5 trillion a year, on the military. This comes to $12,000 per household. That’s real money.   

That is a lot of money to spend for no obvious reason. It means less money for healthcare, childcare, education, and many other items that people care about.

The question people should be asking is who is this spending supposed to defend us against? Perhaps Trump has Russia in mind, but he is supposed to be good buddies with Putin. Besides, Russia’s GDP is less than a quarter the size of the U.S. economy. Do we really need to spend an amount that is more than 20% of Russia’s GDP to protect us against them? Can our military be that inefficient and corrupt?

Maybe Trump is thinking of China. That would be a problem, since China’s economy is already one-third larger than ours and growing far more rapidly. If Trump’s plan is to have a New Cold War with China, that is one we are likely to lose, especially since he just told all our allies to go to hell.

As with the Iran War, Trump’s push towards a newly militarized economy does not seem well-considered. Or at least it doesn’t seem well-considered as a defense strategy. If the point is to put taxpayer dollars into the pockets of his family and friends, it can work out just fine. Until there is evidence otherwise, we should assume this is Trump’s real agenda for his big military budget.

In addition to reducing our security and jeopardizing the well-being of people around the world, Donald Trump’s belligerence will cost us a huge amount of money. But at least his family and friends will get even richer. Who knows, maybe he will even get the Nobel Peace Prize this year.  

The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday accused US President Donald Trump of “orchestrating a $1,700,000,000 fraud on the American taxpayer to line the pockets of his MAGA political allies” amid new reporting on the terms Trump is seeking in talks to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service.

ABC News reported late Thursday that Trump is expected to drop his lawsuit in the coming days “in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration.” The money would come from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, which pays out court judgments and settlements against the federal government.

The president is also expected to receive a public apology from the IRS for the leak of his tax returns during his first White House term.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said in a statement that the reported settlement terms represent “another installment” in Trump’s “ongoing effort to turn the federal government into a personal cash machine for his unpopular extremist movement.”

“This is a massive and unprecedented presidential plunder of the American people,” said Raskin. “Worse still, this is only the beginning—a declaration that the prior payouts were just a down payment, and that he now intends to earmark billions more in taxpayer dollars for his political allies, sycophants, and private militia of unemployed insurrectionists.”

“The president has no authority to conjure up billion-dollar compensation schemes or raid the Judgment Fund, which exists to settle valid lawsuits. Trump is systematically converting neutral government mechanisms into a presidential slush fund to build his army of political dependents,” Raskin continued. “Congress must act immediately to reassert the power of the purse and stop this brazen looting of taxpayer funds before this ‘pilot program’ for corruption becomes the permanent operating system of our government.”

According to ABC, which cited unnamed sources who emphasized that the settlement’s terms should not be considered final until officially announced, the deal is “expected to prohibit Trump from directly receiving payments related to those three legal claims; however, entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims.”

“The arrangement would be an unprecedented use of taxpayer dollars with little oversight,” ABC noted. “Under the terms of the potential settlement agreement, President Trump would have the authority to remove members of the commission running the fund without cause, and the commission would be under no obligation to disclose its procedures or decision-making process for awarding more than a billion dollars.”

ABC’s story came on the heels of reports earlier this week revealing internal Justice Department discussions on settling Trump’s lawsuit, which he filed in late January. Last month, a federal judge questioned the constitutionality of Trump’s suit, noting that “he is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.”

“Real story: Judge was about to throw out the case because Trump controls both parties,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) wrote late Thursday. “Before it’s dismissed, Trump tells both parties to reach a ‘settlement.’ Settlement shields Trump from any future audit and creates a secret slush fund that can dole out money to anyone with no transparency.”

“Mind-boggling corruption,” Goldman added.

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump’s plan to put weapons in space — pitched as a “Golden Dome for America” missile defense program — is estimated to cost $1.2 trillion over a 20-year period, according to a new analysis from the Congressional Budget Office, a far heftier sum than the initial $175 billion price tag he gave last year. The nonpartisan CBO report, published Tuesday, is described as an analysis that reflects “one illustrative approach rather than an estimate of a specific Administration proposal.”